（外文电子版资料）Simak, Clifford D - Final Gentleman.pdfVIP

file:///G|/rah/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Final%20Gentleman.txt Title : Final Gentleman Author : Clifford D. Simak Original copyright year: 1959 Genre : science fiction Comments : to my knowledge, this is the only available e-text of this book Source : scanned and OCR-read from a paperback edition with Xerox TextBridge Pro 9.0, proofread in MS Word 2000. Date of e-text : February 5, 2000 Prepared by : Anada Sucka Anticopyright 2000. All rights reversed. ====================================================================== Final Gentleman Clifford D. Simak After thirty years and several million words there finally came a day when he couldnt write a line. There was nothing more to say. He had said it all. The book, the last of many of them, had been finished weeks ago and would be published soon and there was an emptiness inside of him, a sense of having been completely drained away. He sat now at the study window, waiting for the man from the news magazine to come, looking out across the wilderness of lawn, with its evergreens and birches and the gayness of the tulips. And he wondered why he cared that he would write no more, for certainly he had said a great deal more than most men in his trade and most of it more to the point than was usual, and cloaked though it was in fictional garb, hed said it with sincerity and, he hoped, convincingly. His place in literature was secure and solid. And, perhaps, he thought, this was the way it should be - to stop now at the floodtide of his art rather than to go into his declining years with the sharp tooth of senility nibbling away the bright valor of his work. And yet there remained the urge to write, an inborn feeling that to fail to write was treachery, although to whom it might be traitorous he had no idea. And there was more to it than that: An injured pride, perhaps, and a sense of panic such as th